[Radiance-general] Research tools: who what which how?

[Guglielmetti, Robert]

On 4/13/16, 6:48 AM, "Nathaniel Jones" <nathanieljon at gmail.com<mailto:nathanieljon at gmail.com>> wrote:

I'm under the impression that people choose programming languages based on the APIs that make them necessary.

Bingo.


My two cents on this thread: Pick the language that is appropriate to your project, not the language that you've heard is "popular".

Bingo, again.

As for me I use Ruby for scripting (now), precisely for the API reason Nathaniel stated above. SketchUp's API is Ruby, so the OpenStudio team exports the C++ codebase to Ruby too, and that's how our internal scripts or "measures" are written. Prior to that though, I used Python, at Schorsch's urging (this goes all the way back to 2003). Still using bash too though. For stats and dataviz, I'm trying to use R and JavaScript libraries, but also fall back on Excel/VBA because I know it. R is great for large datasets though. If I was still doing a lot of Python, I imagine the same could be accomplished with matplotlib/numpy though. Nathaniel said all of this more succinctly. I'm out!

- Rob